why is pipeline (and maybe colo) so localized?

[Martin Pool]

On 12 October 2011 16:29, Aaron Bentley <aaron at aaronbentley.com> wrote:
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> On 11-10-11 07:47 PM, Wichmann, Mats D wrote:
>> But with a branch set up with pipelines, that doesn't work... if I
>> copy it over, it's "not a branch".  Yes, there's an aspect that's
>> immediately visible, .bzr/branch/location is (needlessly?) branded
>> with an absolute path which is certainly going to be different for
>> a different OS, since Windoze home directories are not in the same
>> place as Linux ones.
>
> That decision originates with lightweight checkouts, not with
> pipelines.  Pipelines takes pains to be as compatible with
> contemporary formats and processes as possible, so it uses lightweight
> checkouts rather than following looms and introducing a new branch format.
>
> This affects only the working tree.  The branches themselves are still
> accessible, and "bzr switch --force" should make the checkout use the
> new location.  If you used reconfigure-pipeline, they will be in
> .bzr/branches/ or .bzr/pipes/
>
> IIRC, the original rationale for lightweight checkouts was that
> absolute locations make it more convenient to move the lightweight
> checkout itself around.

I believe we fixed things a while ago so that bzr is happy with having
a relative path there.  Whether we _should_ put a relative path (by
default?) there is a bit more complex, but perhaps we should.  One
option that was discussed was to record either absolute or relative
depending on what you gave on the command line when creating the
object, but I think that turned out to be not quite trivial to
implement (because the information is lost in intervening layers.)

I would think that for pipelines using relative paths would probably be better.

m